My Approach to Therapy
Following assessment and in conversation with a client, my approach to therapy will be decided. What distinguishes my approach to assessment, therapy, and consultation is emphasis upon the basic causes of blockages to personal happiness and distress that are unique to each person. This proceeds by enhancing awareness of the underlying workings of mind. This is equivalent to”making the unconscious, conscious” through the identification and interpretation of personal preoccupations, the pattern of thought, the emergence of emotions, the significance of dreams and other products of mental activity not under the exclusive control of consciousness. During treatment, the couch is available to promote reverie and facilitate access to the default network.
This approach aims to enhance personal knowledge, health, and wisdom through the depth exploration of self. This approach to therapy reveals network activity outside of conscious awareness. Network activity that otherwise may not come to conscious awareness includes unvoiced emotions, wishes, thoughts, identifications, and self-appraisals. To know oneself is to free oneself from hidden and often disowned facets of one’s being.
Short-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
This is a cost-effective method for specific problems. Mutually agreed, psychological appraisal, diagnosis, and treatment plan are followed by a problem-focused, no nonsense 5 to 52 psychotherapy sessions. Short-term psychodynamic therapy results in new perspectives, ways of thinking, self-understanding and the understanding of others, freedom from inner hindrance, and crippling emotion.
Imagination focused Psychotherapy
I have published peer reviewed papers on dream interpretation and neuropsychology. I have provided workshops on dreams for professionals at the New School for Social Research, the Karen Horney Institute, the School of Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, the California School of Professional Psychology, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.
This approach to psychotherapy gives particular importance to imagination, fantasy, and dreams. The entire therapy may be focused on dream material. In my experience, this emphasis works particularly well for persons in the creative and performing arts.
Imagination, dreams, and fantasy arise from the networks outside of conscious control. These play a particularly important part in self-discovery and understanding. Following the affect and imagery of dreams, day dreams, and fantasy leads to the inner world that is the foundation of genuine individuality and the true self.
Dream-focused therapy expedites the revelation of unconscious emotion, wishes, cognition, identifications, and self-appraisals. In the process, the participant quickly expands awareness and the sense of self is enriched.
Personal Consultation for Life Transitions
In addition to short-term and depth-oriented treatments, I provide brief, problem-focused interventions to promote emotional clarity about life choices and transitions.
Assessment and Evaluation
A clinical interview, typically two hours in length, is followed by Person-centered Assessment (see below). I employ tests only when useful. Usually with adults, a clinical interview is sufficient for consultation and treatment planning. Based on information from the clinical interview and assessment, I make recommendations for change in regime, life style, and/or short-term or longer term therapy. As a matter of practice, I recommend the most cost-effective approaches to remediation and health.
Person-centered Assessment
Every person occupies a unique world. Person-centered, individualized assessment focuses upon the individual person. A person’s feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, memories, stories, and dreams are unique to himself or herself. Rating scales, true-false, and multiple choice questions do not capture this uniqueness. Person-centered, individualized assessment is built upon the person’s own ways of perceiving, thinking, remembering and imaging. The method examines the harmony or conflict between or among networks.
Assessment of executive reason is an important part of my therapeutic approach, that is, how you go about reasoning and making choices –what a person considers important and why. To assess executive reason, I employ a series of standard questions tested with hundreds of persons from childhood through advanced maturity. A person’s executive style limits and informs judgment and thought.
Executive Judgment Inventory
Person-centered assessment makes particular use of performance tests which permit and elicit individuality. Performance tests that I employ in my practice when appropriate are individually administered intelligence and neuropsychological tests, the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test, and the Music Apperception Test.
The Music Apperception Test (MAT) resonates with basic emotions and evokes feelings, memories, images, and stories that have dream-like qualities. Client narratives to the MAT provide a window to networks that underlie imaginative desire and interpersonal relations. Information from the test greatly speeds the process and depth of personal exploration and development.
The Music Apperception Test
These tests provide a nuanced picture about how the person behaves, experiences, and understands one’s self and the world. Results from performance tests provide actionable goals tailored to the individual . One-size-fits-all paper-and-pencil tests merely categorize persons. They do not reveal his or her essential nature.